Each of the past three centuries has been dominated by a single technology. The eighteenth century included great mechanical systems ushering in the industrial revolution. The nineteenth century saw the steam engine's development. During the twentieth century, the key technology was information gathering, processing, and distribution. Other developments include worldwide telephone networks, radio and television, the birth and unprecedented growth in the computer industry, and communication satellites.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, these areas are rapidly converging, and the differences between collecting, transporting, storing, and processing information are quickly disappearing. For example, enterprises with hundreds of offices spread over a wide geographical area routinely expect to inspect the current status of even their most remote office at the push of a button. As capabilities to gather, process, and distribute information grow, the demand for even more sophisticated information processing grows faster.
As a result of these advancing technologies, large electronic commerce (e-commerce) applications have been developed, for example, using the Internet. Many e-commerce applications accept customer input using hypertext markup language (HTML) forms and store the input data into a database for later retrieval and processing. Substantial development effort could be required for developing the HTML form, the associated data validation, and code for the storage and retrieval of data. In some situations, the business owner of the application also wants the ability to change the format or data validation of the HTML form on a production system directly, rather than having a development team revise code or web pages, and then deploy the changes to the production system after testing.
Although many form design software applications are available to help developers design HTML forms, none are netweb-based, and thus may not be used by the customer directly from a browser. For example, prior systems require some custom application to be installed on a user/developer's computer desktop. After a developer designs an HTML form, the form may need to be deployed to production through the traditional change deployment process. Moreover, prior systems lack direct integration with a database. For example, prior systems only create the HTML form, for example, while the developer may need to design the associated database schema and write code for database storage and retrieval of the data entered in the created form.
Thus, there is a need for improved systems and methods for providing data form management. For instance, there is a need to provide data form creation and modification over a network. Furthermore, there is a need for such improved systems and methods to directly integrate with databases.